Archive for April 2011

This packet becomes a finalist for the worst
manuscript submission ever received at this address
OR at our previous editorial offices,
though we easily tossed out reams
of bright copies in the move. Thank your
“centuries of stars” and all other Light & Power images
roughed into these scabbed on notebook jottings,
that our last “editor emeritus” was canned
before volt testing these bundled entities. Rhyming
“artifice” with “Artemis” (virgin goddess of the hunt & moon),
though not technically prohibited,
perpetuates a misdemeanor of aggravated insult.

Sprinkling The Irish Times online weather forecasts
throughout Roman numeral numbered selections
diffuses the desolation. We’re now inured to surveys
of barren skies that change from prolonged rain
to isolated showers to risk of drizzle, though bare
for The Burren is brilliant, if it were only yours.

And we will never assent to reverent inventories
of leather carryons, nor perpetuate pieced together
ransom notes of patched together reports
and paginated attempts at collage. All titles drizzle
this impression, a lost wax theory of poetics,
candle liquefaction into stalagmites, mining nothing.

Kennings of cold ones, the hammer, and road to paradise
slide off the stanzas like pond-deer on cloud-streets.
Please, no found poems in the tax code, no six-line poems
of Seymour Glass from Salinger’s descriptions; for bathos
is just a letter flipped upside down from pathos
on the wrong refrigerator.

If only there were spooked horses, slapped together skids,
braced stalls, if we could see the years
of bites and scratches as the ewes pushed for a place.
Give us a yard sale saucer on top of an icebox,
a rusted biscuit tin, instead of mourning
another star lost in a far galaxy culled from
the science section of Tuesday’s paper.

Thank you for your interest in the press
and continued cohesion in your industry,
so little recognized.